Chris
Rice Cooper
Scripted Interview with Poet John Gallaher on His Poetry
Collection In A Landscape
“The Unadorned
Nonfiction In Verse”
001
The date
you first started writing In A Landscape
and the date In A Landscape was
completed?
August 25th, 2009 – January 6th,
2010. I’m guessing. But it was something like that.
002
Can you
describe in great detail the step by step process of writing In A Landscape from the moment the idea
was first conceived in your brain until final book form?
This book came about through several things happening at the
same time. First, I had just come off a
long collaborative project and wanted to do something very different. I happened to be re-reading John Cage’s book SILENCE
at that time, and I had just recently watched a
Pitchfork Classic
documentary on the making of The Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin,
where Wayne Coyne talks about moving away from making things up in his lyrics
to just saying what he thought about things.
The Coyne and the Cage went together nicely in my mind, and I decided to
try just talking, without thinking what it was leading to.
I had about an hour every morning in the fall of 2009,
before waking the family up for work and school, and I had a little writing
ritual I would follow. I would put on
the album In a Landscape, a collection of compositions by John Cage with
Stephen Drury on piano. Then I would ask
myself a question and try to answer it without making anything up. Whatever “without making anything up” might
mean.
That was how I specifically started section one, and I then
used the chance elements of how section one turned out, to become something of
a blueprint for the rest of the book; how each section usually starts off with
something like a general question; how each section is three thick stanzas; how
the middle stanza is often unfiltered autobiography. “Unfiltered autobiography” is as close as I
can come to naming the process right now.
Maybe tomorrow I’d name it something else. But what I mean is that I was consciously
trying to not make a poem. I wasn’t
thinking about craft or coherence so much as I was really just turning over
ideas and experiences, to see what I thought of them. People have called this book a “diary-poem,”
a “daybook,” “essay-poem.” I was just
trying to think some things over. I’d
recently seen the video (it was everywhere for a time) of Randy Pausch’s “Last
Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon, and I think a lot of the issues he brought up were
still with me.
As for its form, the book is poetry, it looks like poetry
(the lines break!), but yet, it doesn’t do a lot of the things poems usually
do. The “just talking” aspect of the
book works against things such as central unity, resolution, and a narrative or
formal arc. I think it helps to
hybridize the description. If one were
to come to the poem thinking only “here’s a poem!” that would probably still
work fine, but thinking “here’s a shot at non-fiction in verse” might help
situate the reading a little more. I
guess I’m just uncomfortable with myself maybe.
I feel very, well, present in this book.
Unadorned, maybe. There’s not
much to hide behind in this book. It’s
all pretty much right there: what I really think about things, what I’ve been
through. And some of it’s slight and
some of it’s uncomfortable. Calling it
non-fiction or something makes me feel I have this other genre to help me out,
that I can call to for support. It’s
probably just a game I’m playing with myself, but it’s working so far.
But in a larger context, I’ve written the way I have for
years from out of the idea that, as Robert Lowell (right, at the Harvard Bookshop in the 1960s. CCbySA3.0) says, “I wanted to make
something imagined, not recalled.” And
to recall, to place memory and my experience to the front like this, that made
me very uncomfortable. All my life I’ve
had problems with authority, both as someone living under authority, and being
seen in any way as an authority figure.
I am suspicious of closed, or final, authoritative meaning, as well as
the authoritative voice. But at some
point I want (or I need) to say things, to name what I believe. This book is part of that struggle.
003
Can you
describe the publishing process of In A Landscape?
There’s not much to say about this, really. The individual sections that were published,
were published with the title “In a Landscape” followed by the section
number. As for the book, I was already
under contract with BOA from the book I co-wrote with G.C. Waldrep, Your
Father On the Train of Ghosts.
BOA had right of first refusal on my next manuscript, and I sent them
this one and, bless them, they took it.
It was a gamble on their part, as it’s not an easy book to classify or
describe, and I will forever be grateful for their support.
Excerpt
from In A Landscape given copyright privilege
by John Gallaher
I
“Are
you happy?” That’s a good place to
start, or maybe,
“Do
you think you’re happy?” with its more negative
tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling.
That’s part
of
the problem too, but not all of the problem.
Flowers out the window
or
on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.
We
spend a long time interested in which way the car would
best
go in the driveway. Is that the
beginning of an answer?
Some
way to say who we are?
Well,
it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations
of
structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses
and
invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus
to
get us going. And what was it Michael
said yesterday? That
the
committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these
other
things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,
so
then we have this difficulty. It just
gets to you sometimes. We have
a
table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you
about
apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made
several
distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors.
How
can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game,
How,
for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness
by
saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too.
On
the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside,
a
garbage truck passes right to left. They
intersect. And so the world continues
around
two corners. The table gets turned over,
with several people
standing
around seemingly not sure of what comes next.
Look at them
politely
as you can, they’re beginners too. And
they say the right question
is
far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good,
anyway,
in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something
you
can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way
as
well. Looking back at the alternatives,
we never had children
or
we had more children. And what were
their names? As the living room parts
into
halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant,
a
filing cabinet or two . . . because some of these questions
you
have with others, and some you have only with yourself.
Finding
the Raven,
published by White Stagg an imprint of Ravenswood Publishing http://ravenswoodpublishing.
The
two young women become the best of friends sharing each others secrets, dreams
and fears. Rose answers a matrimonial ad
and Julie finds a job as a seamstress. Image right from an advertisement in The St. Louis Republic May 8, 1905. Public Domain. 
She takes the black crystal to a reputable and honest jeweler to have it
appraised and learns it is a very rare and highly valuable tourmaline black
crystal. The jeweler tells her it has a
rainbow of colors and is used by sorcerers and soothsayers. He recommends that she keep the black crystal
in a bank box in her own name.
Her second book of poetry Painting the Egret’s Echo won the Library of
Poetry Book Award for 2012 from the Bitter Oleander Press, and she was the
featured poet in their Spring 2014 issue. 
